How do individuals upholding an ethos of nonviolence tell their life narratives in places ravaged by armed conflict? With an understanding of violence and nonviolence as socially contingent concepts,_ Emplotting Nonviolence in Colombian Autobiographies_ focuses on the life writings of three Colombian social movement leaders (the U’wa Esperanza-Aguablanca’s Tengo los pies en la cabeza, the Afrocolombian Rudecindo Castro’s Calle caliente, and the LGBTQ+ artivist Manuel Antonio Velandia’s De homosexual a marica sujeto de derechos) and contrasts them with the memoirs of a hegemonic ex-president (Álvaro Uribe’s No Lost Causes). These autobiographies are analyzed using a “contextual narratology of contingency”. This is a narrative approach that examines “emplotment” —the structuring of storytelling sequences and its narrative devices— in the light of historical literary genres. Moreover, through a context-sensitive literary lens, this approach emphasizes each book’s rhetoric of group-oriented self-representation, or “collective narration” and the way literary genres inflect the representation of nonviolence.